U.S. Pat. No. 6,368,440 issued Apr. 2002 to Yu et al., and entitled “Method for fabricating a flexible belt with a puzzle-cut seam” and commonly assigned, discloses a method that includes the steps of first, joining the two belt ends to form a juncture; second, applying an adhesive strip to the juncture; third, applying a compressing force to the adhesive strip; fourth, heating the adhesive strip for a heating period; fifth, cooling the adhesive strip for a cooling period; thus forming a puzzle-cut seam.
It was suggested in Yu et al. to use a mechanical polishing step to remove the adhesive from the outer belt surface and smooth out the seam profile in an attempt to achieving nil differential seam thickness in the treated puzzle-cut seam. It was understood that, while adhesive material was removed from the outer belt surface of the seam to achieve the nil differential seam thickness, there substantially remained that portion of the adhesive material that had previously flowed into and filled the crevices between the mating first and second puzzle-cut patterns of fingers of the belt ends and bonded to the interfaces of such fingers to form the seam. Despite this, it has been found necessary as disclosed in commonly assigned U.S. application Ser. No. 09/723,150, to attempt particular methods and apparatus to further refinish the external surface of such a seam of such belts in order to make such external surface suitable for imaging or imageable.
However, it has been found that the adhesive applied to such a seam flows through the crevices and together with any lack of complete smoothness on the inside surface of the seam, undesirably leaves a non-smooth surface or bump or residue on the inside surface of such a seam. Although such non-smoothness, or such bump on the inside surface of the seam can still leave the outer surface of seam “imageable”, the non-smoothness or bump on the inside surface of the seam however causes imaging disturbances as such inside surface rides over belt supporting rollers or backer bars during imaging steps. Such imaging disturbances have been found to undesirably result in image “ghosts” or distortions.
Ordinarily, principles of precision or “superpolishing” of a surface require moving the polishing media across the surface to be polished in a random manner. This is accomplished by moving the polishing media simultaneously in two directions (X, Y) while in contact with the surface to be polished. Unfortunately however, this cannot done as is when the surface to be polished is part of the inside diameter surface of a flexible belt because the enclosed and confined areas therein tend to restrict the use of conventional polishing equipment.
There is therefore a need for apparatus for superfinishing and superpolishing the inside surface of photoreceptor belt seems so as to prevent such image distortions.